ATI Wisdom Booklets: How Not to Farm In Temperate Areas....

ATI Wisdom Booklet #18 tackles the rules involving farming and animal husbandry covered in the Old Testament. 

These rules are fascinating from historical and scientific perspectives.  These rules reflected pieces of hard-won wisdom about farming in an arid climate and methods of preventing loss of crops.  They are a great jumping off point for discussions of farming traditions in a variety of cultures and climates.

Since the booklet was produced by ATI, all of that subtlety and nuance is lost.  The rules are assumed to be universal and unchanging so facts are twisted, omitted or entirely falsified to force that conclusion. 

The first page is a jumble of verses from Deuteronomy that state that God will bless His people if they follow the laws of farming.  That's true enough  - but God spends most of Leviticus and Deuteronomy holding out a carrot for good behavior and a threat of absolute destruction for any disobedience - so a grain of salt should be used.

The first law discussed is the Jubilee Year in which no crops are to be harvested.  This happens every seventh year.  The booklet states that fallowing the land allows macro-nutrients to be replenished and erosion to be limited.  Both of those statements are true - but rather misleading.  Fallowing the land is the slowest way to regenerate macro-nutrients I can think of.  Faster ways include applying inorganic fertilizers, applying organic fertilizers like manure or compost, or rotating crops that fix nitrogen like beans.  Likewise, fallowing the land is better at controlling erosion than plowing a field before rain, but modern techniques like no-till planting are even more effective.  If farmers are using outdated and damaging farming methods like deep tillage before rain or stripping nutrients with no return, skipping one year out of every seven isn't going to save their soil.

The last reason is that "Moisture needs to be restored".

In dry and arid areas, farmers will plant a crop on half their land each year.  This allows the ground that is fallowed to absorb a year's rainfall and store it.  When the fallowed area is planted, the plants have the previous year's moisture plus any rain from that year.  Essentially, it's a way to double the amount of water available to a crop.

Nifty trick if you are growing wheat in parts of Kansas, but completely worthless if you live in Michigan since rainfall is abundant.

 The second paragraph was written by someone who has no clue about solubility of ions, water in soil or even basic 2nd grade plant care.    If water is rising up from the ground, the soil is waterlogged.  With a few exceptions, plants need air available to roots to survive; over watering drowns plants.  A waterlogged soil will wash nutrients away just like erosion will.

Truthfully, the idea of a self-watering garden was heavenly to people who lived in a desert - and I don't blame them for that.

The next law is that animals shouldn't breed across species. 

The real explanation for this law is simple: cross-breeding species rarely works and is likely to harm one or both animals during mating.  Occasionally, two species will interbreed like a male jack (donkey) with a female mare to create a mule - but there is a lot of waste in terms of weak or dead offspring.  (Thanks to a former student of mine who grew up on a farm in Mexico where his family bred mules; he let me know that many of the foals died soon after birth from congenital abnormalities.)  In a subsistence lifestyle, there was no room for that kind of waste.

Simple enough, right?

Well, ATI is in a bind.  Mules exist here in the USA and God hasn't smote the owners of mules in the last four millennia.  So....ATI tries an entire song-and-dance to show that donkeys and horses are really the same "kind" of animal.
                                     

Scientists still believe a mule results from crossing two different species. A species of animal is all the organisms that can interbreed to produce fertile offspring.  Horses and donkeys can produce offspring - but the vast majority of mules are sterile.  (The rare examples of fertile mules have all been mares.  They have produced less than 60 foals in the last 500 years and had to be bred to either a horse or a donkey..) The wisdom booklet launches into a page-long introduction to cell parts that misses the entire point then tries to punt:

Yeah.  The information is true - but if donkeys and horses are of the same "kind" so are humans and chimpanzees.

For an embryo to develop the organs it needs to survive, there needs to be the correct number of each pair of chromosomes to survive.  Humans have 46.  People can survive beyond birth an extra chromosome if:

• It is one or more extra copy of an X chromosome because the body has a method to silence all but one X chromosome per cell.  
• It is one or more copy of a Y chromosome because the Y chromosome has only a few genes that are used early in embryonic development - and multiple copies of the gene don't produce toxic amounts of the proteins coded by the gene.
• The gene is number 21 - which is the smallest chromosome - and they are lucky.  Most fetuses with trisomy 21 or Down Syndrome die in early fetal development.

Oversimplifying a bit - mules have pulled off the same trick as people with an extra chromosome. The mule fetus gets an full set of donkey chromosomes from its dam and a full set of horse chromosomes from the sire.  The two species are closely enough related that the two sets of chromosomes have a shot at creating a healthy fetus - and the extra, unmatched horse chromosome doesn't seem to cause problems in the mule except during production of eggs and sperm.  When a mule tries to produce eggs or sperm, that extra chromosome messes up the entire process rendering the mule sterile.

Humans have 46 chromosomes; chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes.  If you look closely at the chromosomes under a microscope - and have a lot of training - you can see that one of the largest human chromosomes is made up of two small chromosomes from the chimpanzee that have fused together.  Exactly like the donkeys and horses - so that means that humans and chimpanzees are of the same "kind".

That's why you should have a real scientist check your conclusions BEFORE publishing.  Seriously, guys, you just created a rationale for interbreeding chimpanzees and humans - and that's creepy as fuck.

The third law the Wisdom booklet covers comes from Deuteronomy 22:9.  The author of this section failed to read the verse correctly to start with.  The verse states that if you plant a vineyard with a second crop, both crops will fail.   This is a true statement in dry, arid areas; a grape plant needs every available bit of water to survive and set fruit.  If you plant an annual crop like wheat with the grape plants, neither plant will get enough water and both will fail to produce a crop.

The author decides that this verse specifically bans all forms of inter-planting of crops and jumps into inter-species competition as an excuse:

That's true if the two plants have the same growth habit, need the same nutrients or compete for water or light.  Farmers throughout the world have figured out that some plant combinations grow better together and produce higher yields.  In the Eastern US, Native Americans inter-planted corn which grows tall, strong stalks that need lots of light and nitrogen with beans and squash.  The beans either grew between or up the corn plants.  Beans capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and release it into the soil - which benefits the corn and squash.  The squash capture light that hadn't be used by the beans or corn by growing broad leaves that nearly cover the soil.  This benefits the beans and the corn because the cooler soil loses less moisture so all three plants get more water.

This is true when talking about small grains like wheat and rye in a single field.   In a patch involving vegetables - or even a crop planted in a vineyard - this objection makes no sense.

Having gone off the deep end, the author now tries to terrify people into planting a single variety of all crops per field - which is standard operating procedure in conventional agriculture - but doesn't have to be.

You can inter-plant a field with multiple varieties of corn and the ears are fine.  We plant a few rows of sweet corn around the edge of a field corn planting to harvest for the workers on the farm.  That's also how a lot of the families who sell sweet corn by the side of the road do it.  Sweet corn pollinated with field corn may have a few kernels that are less sweet - but most people don't notice the difference.  If the idea really bothers you, just plant sweet corn and field corn that have different days-to-harvest; the two varieties will bloom and pollinate at different times which avoids the whole issue.

First, let me celebrate the worst use of clip-art so far in a Wisdom Booklet.  The only way to "improve" it would be to grab a cob of Indian corn and pretend each color is a different corn variety.

Second, the author has never worked with corn.

• Sweet corn dries wonderfully for storage; it's the only way I process corn for my family and it keeps for years without  loss of quality.
• Drying corn to make popcorn is a fine art.  To make popcorn, the corn has to be a popping variety that has just the right amount of starch and dried to a specific moisture point.  Finally, the corn has to be heated until it pops.  I bring this up because the author seems to think that making corn flour involves heating kernels to the point they could pop - but that's not a part of the process.
• The process for grinding corn is two-fold.  The corn is dried.  Next, dry corn is ground into flour.  Any variety of corn can be processed into flour - but sweet corn would make a weirdly sweet flour without much protein in it.  Any variety of corn will turn into a soggy paste when ground if it is still wet.

The last law that I am going to review is "Don't wear fabric made of mixed fibers like wool mixed with linen."  This is a simple prohibition against mixing the holy fiber of wool with linen which was used as an undergarment.  It's not that complicated to understand - but ATI spends the better part of two pages pretending that the electric charge on linen threads is so different from wool threads that the two cannot be combined. I don't know if I need to say this - but the charge on linen and wool will not keep them apart.

Once they've crossed that bridge, they drag in a quacky holistic medicine guru to explain why synthetic fibers are evil:

The quote is insane on the face - but on top of that neither linen nor wool nor a linen-wool blend is a synthetic fiber.  A synthetic fiber is a fiber created from a chemical reaction like nylon or polyester. (It's like the author couldn't be bothered to do some basic background reading on the subject - or realized how insane the idea was and decided to run with it.)

Once they've worked that crazy out, the author gets down to some actual differences between linen fiber and wool fibers.

Let me start with the most obvious problem: the Bible doesn't prohibit impossible things.  Every prohibition in the Bible is based on real things that people do like murder, adultery or eating pork.   This means that even in Biblical times, someone could weave wool and linen together.

A quick visit to a yarn store shows that manufacturers can create wool-linen blends of yarn.  Wool can certainly shrink by 50% - but mainly by washing it in hot water with lots of agitation.  If someone washes the wool fibers by hand in cool water, shrinkage is minimal.